14 DAY TRIAL // A 20-year-old Nebraska resident has been sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay $20,000 for participating in a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against Church of Scientology websites. The attack was part of a larger campaign against CoS led by a group of hacktivists calling themselves Anonymous.
Brian Thomas Mettenbrink, of Grand Island, Nebraska is the second Anonymous member to be convicted in relation to the anti-Scientology attacks of 2008. In January of this year, the DDoSer pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of unauthorized access of a protected computer and agreed to a sentence of one year in prison.
Mettenbrink explained that the coordinated attack was instrumented with the help of a specialized tool that Anonymous members willingly downloaded from an Internet forum and ran on their computers. The special program had the purpose of flooding the Church of Scientology website with unnecessary requests.
In November 2009, Dmitriy Guzner, 19, of Verona, New Jersey, became the first individual to be sentenced to prison for participating in Anonymous' campaign against the Church of Scientology, which, in addition to online harassment, escalated into serious death threats and acts of vandalism. Guzner pled guilty to a charge of unauthorized impairment of a protected computer and was jailed for 366 days.
Anonymous is group of hacktivists believed to have originated in the infamous 4chan /b/ board. The organization, which has since expanded and no longer identifies with that online forum, is currently campaigning against the Australian government's plan to implement a country-wide Internet filter.
Mob-organized denial of service attacks similar to that against the Church of Scientology have accompanied recent political or armed conflicts. During the 2009 Gaza Strip conflict, Israeli students developed a botnet client for supporters to willingly install on their computers and attack Palestinian websites. Later, during the post-election protests in Iran last year, contesters used Twitter to co-ordinate rudimentary mass page reload attacks against governmental websites.